Name: Why buildings fall down
ISBN: 9780393311525

Why buildings fall down

Once upon a time, seven wonders of the world stood tall and brilliant and, it must have seemed, would stand forever, impervious to time and gravity. Now only one remains—the pyramid at Khufu, in the Egyptian desert near Cairo. All of the others have fallen down. Modern technologies, computerized designs, and new materials have minimized structural failures nearly to the vanishing point. Even so, we can learn from ancient as well as recent history. Why Buildings Fall Down chronicles the how and why of the most interesting structural failures in history and especially in the twentieth century. Not even all of the pyramids are still with us. The Pyramid of Meidum has shed 2,500,000 tons of limestone and continues to disintegrate. Beginning there our authors, both world-renowned structural engineers, take us on a guided tour of enlightening structural failures—buildings of all kinds, from ancient domes like Istanbul's Hagia Sophia to the state of the art Hartford Civic Arena, from the man-caused destruction of the Parthenon to the earthquake damage of 1989 in Armenia and San Francisco, the Connecticut Thruway bridge collapse at Mianus, and one of the most fatal structural disasters in American history: the fall of the Hyatt Regency ballroom walkways in Kansas City. Buildings have fallen throughout history whether made of wood, steel, reinforced concrete, or stone. But these failures do respect the laws of physics.

What Hacker News says

retroformatApr 2026

Other books I’ve much enjoyed, when your interest is in structural or other failures:

Why Buildings Fall Down: How Structures Fail by Matthys Levy and Mario Salvadori, a wide ranging history of structural failures of various kinds, and their causes.

Ignition!: An Informal History of Liquid Rocket Propellants by John Drury Clark, which is a personal memoir from a senior researcher with many decades experience developing rocket fuels - he is the proverbial Rocket Scientist. Most interesting, and amusing (in a morbid way), is the quite different culture of safety “back in the day” of this somewhat esoteric engineering/chemistry field.

(okay, I'll stop now!)

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jaclazJan 2020

OT, but not much, if anyone is interested in how/why buildings/structures stand up or collapse, there are a couple great books by Mario Salvadori:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mario_Salvadori

Why Buildings Stand Up (1980) and Why Buildings Fall Down (1992)

that are elementary enough to be read by anyone, without being at all superficial.

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jdavis703Jul 2019

Good engineers like knowing why things break. I just started a book on the reasons why buildings collapse. It’s essential a series of post-mortems of specific events. I have zero formal architectural or civil engineering experience — just an inquisitive disposition. For anyone interested, the book is called ”Why Buildings Fall Down.”

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astrodustSep 2018

The book Why Buildings Fall Down is full of significant historical collapses and pretty much every one boils down to a lack of redundancy, a single point of failure.

http://books.wwnorton.com/books/Why-Buildings-Fall-Down/

Lessons for software engineering right there.

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mauvehausMar 2018

Thank for the recommendation! If you're into that sort of thing, you might also enjoy Why Buildings Stand Up and Why Buildings Fall Down.

Why Buildings Fall Down includes a case study on a seemingly minor change during construction that caused a walkway to collapse once it was put in use.

At the risk of stating the obvious, these are focused on buildings rather than roads :-)

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jaclazMar 2018

I would suggest - as basic readings for those that are not structural engineers or however working in the field or familiar with it - these two (by now "classics") by Mario Salvadori:

Why Buildings Stand Up: The Strength of Architecture

Why Buildings Fall Down: How Structures Fail

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